


That Time Roy Mustang’s Terrible Handwriting Almost Killed Someone

by high_spring_tide



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Gen, just in a bureaucratic way, my ongoing fascination with bureaucracy, original female character but not in a shipping way, pride is lurking in the shadows as usual
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-14
Updated: 2019-04-14
Packaged: 2020-01-13 00:28:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18457751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/high_spring_tide/pseuds/high_spring_tide
Summary: Col. Mustang has cryptic chicken scratch handwriting, which is never particularly convenient, but becomes a significantly bigger problem after he loses his staff.





	That Time Roy Mustang’s Terrible Handwriting Almost Killed Someone

There is a cliche in Amestris about alchemists, that somewhere amidst the years of drawing impeccable transmutation circles and scribbling down cryptic notes, they all develop terrible handwriting. But the consensus, in every office in which the Flame Alchemist has ever worked, is that he really takes this to new and unacceptable levels. 

It’s bad enough when he’s writing things for other people to read. Mustang’s penmanship is frankly appalling, and on top of that he has a tendency, borrowed from alchemical practice, to throw in standard military shorthand used so idiosyncratically as to be incomprehensible. (It’s a bit questionable to use a shorthand symbol for a quartermaster in a longhand report. It’s inexcusable to combine the symbols for “quartermaster” and “shelter” to mean “supply cache,” and then use the invented symbol for a supply cache to mean a bakery, or a library.) But when Mustang is taking notes for his own use, he also throws in standard alchemical symbols, idiosyncratically used alchemical symbols, and symbols of his own invention. 

Mustang’s staff officers are more or less able to struggle through the colonel’s writing when he wants things to be read. And it’s possible that a team of handwriting experts, military scribes, and alchemists would be able to read his personal notes, given enough time. (Hawkeye, of course, can read anything Mustang’s written. There’s a running debate about whether or not she even needs to slow down.) 

And then Mustang does something to piss off General Raven, or offends the Fuhrer, or something stupid like that--the rumors are varied but unclear--and High Command scatters his staff to the four winds. But Mustang still has to file paperwork, and now a new team of officers from Central are the ones desperately trying to make sense of his handwriting. With Hawkeye gone, it’s career bureaucrat 2nd Lt. Mara Durocher who handles most of Mustang’s paperwork. The colonel does his best to write neater, now, but there are still plenty of times when Durocher can’t make heads or tails of what he’s written. And then she has to track down her superior officer, the famed war hero, perhaps the youngest colonel in the whole military, and ask whether that was an i or a t or an e, and what was this mark that looked like half a hat, and what did this entire sentence say. 

Until one day when Durocher gets a file which she can’t make out at all, but she’s already asked Mustang for help reading his writing like five times that week, and she can’t bear to ask again. She considers, briefly, asking for help from a cryptographer, but she really shouldn’t be showing the colonel’s paperwork to random strangers. Unless. . . Durocher runs into Lt. Hawkeye in the cafeteria fairly frequently, and Hawkeye had worked for Mustang for years before she was lucky enough to get promoted to be the Fuhrer’s adjunct. She could almost certainly help Durocher make sense of the form. And if Hawkeye is Bradley’s adjunct, then certainly she has the security clearance to see Col. Mustang’s paperwork. 

That afternoon around lunch, Hawkeye is trying to focus on coming up with a grocery list, and not what’s happening up at Briggs or under Central, when a woman she vaguely recognizes approaches her. Approaches her conspiratorially. 

There are three possibilities, Hawkeye thinks, as Durocher tells her how she works in Mustangs office and needs Hawkeye’s help in reading some documents the colonel has written. One, Mustang is trying to send her a message via Durocher. Two, Bradley is testing her. And three, Durocher’s story is true and it’s only by accident that she looks like she’s now one of Mustang’s accomplices. 

Well, Mustang wouldn't trust an outsider this quickly, and he wouldn’t send an innocent person unknowingly into danger. And whether this is a test or not, she’s got to make it clear that she’s not doing anything suspicious. She risks a glance down at the papers Durocher is proffering. Oh dear, the colonel’s chicken scratch scribbles do really look like a code, don’t they. 

So Hawkeye steers Durocher out of the abandoned hallway and into the crowded cafeteria. “Of course, Lieutenant, I’d be happy to help,” she says, pulling Durocher over to a table full of people she knows slightly. There, she spreads the paperwork over the table and starts complaining loudly about all the problems caused because a certain state alchemist, her old boss, wrote less legibly than a drunken monkey. She even points out a few choice words to the people sitting around her. The other officers, at first skeptical that this Colonel Mustang’s writing was worse than that of your typical state alchemist, gather round to see. They are duly impressed, and the table has a lively conversation about the irritating things their own bosses do. Durocher, meanwhile, is terribly embarrassed that now everyone knows she couldn’t read her boss’s handwriting, and resolves not to ask Hawkeye for help any more. 

And maybe, somebody or something that was watching exhales a bit, and concludes that although Durocher was carrying an illegible message from the traitor Col. Mustang to Col. Mustang’s closest ally, and although she entrusted that ally with that message in hoped-for secrecy, any information that Lt. Hawkeye would make so public must truly be unrelated to any plot.

**Author's Note:**

> On tumblr at highspringtide.tumblr.com!


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